The following program is produced by the Tech Talk Radio Network.
Hey, folks, this is Sam Kinnison and you're listening to tech talk radio right here. You understand that, you cake, oh oh.
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean de Weird. Thank you for being here, and I know Sean has had a very very exciting couple of weeks. First off, you'll be able to watch the video of him walking around the show floor of the National Association of Broadcasters the Big NAB Show. This is your first show that you went to, right, So it's the.
First time I've went to this specific trade show for broadcast. Yeah. So it's an annual show they do in Vegas. It's the largest broadcasting trade show in the world.
Right.
I did a live chot with Andy while we were there, and also walking on just one of the buildings of the trade floor.
So yeah, they had stuff everywhere and it was funny because of course broadcasting covers television, it covers radio, covers at radio. Now it's covering the Internet as well.
So it's interesting to see because I've been in the broadcasting eighty obviously you've been in the broadcast industry for radio since the early eighties. I've been in broadcast television since the late two thousand and you know, two thousand and nine, the late twenty tens, and even from that time frame to now, it's changed. And what's interesting is it's kind of a weird blending of prosumer and professional equipment because you have a lot of content creators that
are doing large studio productions now YouTube studios. I mentioned it to you in our call, is that I got to network with so many great people. I got to meet a lot of the people that my boss has known for decades across the industry. And what was cool was we were meeting with one specific vendor when another guy came up and was talking to our vendor real
quickly because he knew them. He went they went to college together, right, But it was the lead I don't remember what his title was, but like the lead content developer for dude Perfect.
Oh wow, well that's pretty cool.
So I mean, if you're listening to this and you don't know who dude Perfect is, Dude Perfect is probably one of the largest YouTube channels that exists based off of you know, the Internet, Like they one of the largest YouTube channels that exist. So they were there because they're looking for new equipment for a new facility they're building for their studio. They're building another large studio on their property for Dude Perfect.
You know, for people there, Yeah, it had to be kind of eye opening for you. For people who say, you know, well there's no money in broadcasting on YouTube, there's no money in you know, creating content. You find that to be a I mean, they're going to build a studio and they're so they.
The dude you have to put the super protective, right. The Dude Perfect just started off as like it's like three guys, right, three guys doing YouTube show. It blew up. Then they had enough money to build a forty thousand square foot studio. Now they're adding on an additional forty thousand foot building, forty thousand square foot building that has sound stages and other sets, and they're developing them and expanding their brand. So they're they're looking at vendors for
what who can provide the equipment? And I mean it's it's from everything. It's from it's from planning and execution software for pre production, it's equipment, it's integrators, it's the actual content you're creating. It's editing, it's post production, it's lighting, it's sound, it's design, it's literally everything you need to
have your entire production taken care of. You could get at anyb and it's meeting with industry reps, it's meeting with vendors, it's meeting with your sales you know, the people that take care of you on the sales teams and stuff. I met more people that I've talked to on the phone or via email for the first time, which is great. And I met new people well it I hadn't met.
It had to be kind of cool, Sean, because you do use a lot of gear obviously for the games that they do at Notre Dame, where you know you're working and stuff, so this might be for you the first time actually reaching and meeting somebody that makes a tripod or makes amount or makes the camera or makes you know, something that you use in the production booth. That had to be kind of a cool experience.
Yeah. I got to talk to the people that make the products too, right. I got to talk to the product developers for our intercom system for you know, the guy that works on the lenses for Cannon that like that.
It's like I got to talk to these people and expect get to know them and you know, get to provide feedback to them saying like, this is what we're using it for, this is a use case that we're using it for, this is why we like this product, and this is the feat back that we can give you on you know, our clients experience with your product. And that's all just the name of the game, right,
It's just part of the business. It's part of why NAB is so great is you get to meet with all these great people.
When it comes to products that really stood out. Was there something that you saw at NAB that made you say, whoa, And maybe it's not even out yet, but it's going to be coming out, because that's that's the neat thing about this this show that you said, oh, this is something we need to eventually get to help our workflow.
A lot of people went into NAB saying AI is going to be in your face. Right, it was there, It was prevalent. What you saw a lot in terms of AI was AI audio mixing, AI camera tracking right, and some AI editing tools. I mean a lot of AI editing, a lot of AI editing tools the AI AI. Yeah, mixing is cool because you could simulate. There's a company called Salsa Sound, right. They make a product where you provide it audio and you map it out on basically,
say soccer for example. That's what we're gonna demo it for. You map it out and say, here's where this microphone is on the pitch, Here's where this one is, here's where that one is, Here's where my announcements are, and you feed it. The audist is very You feed it the specific audio for those locations, and then it auto
mixes as it follows the game. Wow, as the ball goes to the left hand side of the field, as the mics pick up more audio, it brings the mics on the right side of the field down and brings up the mics on.
The left side.
Auto mixes based on some vision AI but also mostly just audio AI. Basically, the MIC's requieter on the north end, so it's gonna be cloud the play is actually happening on the south end. So but it can gate, it can auto gate, it can limit, it can do all this stuff automatically.
Does that worry you though? I mean we let's let's face it, you know, we talk about how cool AI is. We've used AI in different sources, different ways, but you have technical directors that and I've I've worked in a TV studio before as well. You know, they they take take camera one, take camera two, take camera three. You know,
and your guys you're using you know, multiple cameras. Will AI eventually be the one to choose, like, you know, hey, camera, the ball is running down this way, we're switching to this camera.
So you say that Ross. Ross is a company that provides tons of broadcasts features across the age. They're one of the largest in the in the industry. They demoed on stage a AI listening technical director right where that the CEO of Ross walked across the stage and was talking about the weather. And it not only did AI cutting in terms of cutting cameras, but it actually put
in graphics. It put in like he talked about the weather out to find the look up the Ross twenty twenty five and it'd be keynote, right, and I don't remember, I don't remember what they called it, what they called the specific product, but he was just talking about, well, let's take a look at the seven day forecast, and it automatically changed the graphics, showed the seven day forecast, and he could just he could kind of just pick and choose what he wanted to say, and it would
automatically change the scene. It would kind of it. But it was also interpretive, so it could it could anticipate what he was gonna talk about next, uh, and it automatically changed the green screen graphics and automatically changed the cameras. It was pretty wild. Yeah, I will say it was interesting to see. They showed a live output of the trans the transcription man didn't get.
A lot of words wrong, did it really?
Yeah, we're watching it, We're watching it side by side, like with what's happening versus what the a eyes reading it didn't even it didn't even get their own products right, which was kind of funny. But I mean, for that to be happening that fast in the cloud, and because
it was all cloud based, was pretty impressive. Because last year they did demo a a guy sitting at his desk, hands in the air saying all right, ready one cut one, ready to cut two ready, you know, and it was actually following along, So that's coming, we know that's coming. Some more automation in terms of like the overdrive portion where a director goes in and they don't have a
technical director. They just code the show based on camera shots and based on queues and things like that, and then they just hit the space bar and it moves forward. A lot of people don't realize that a lot of newsrooms are automated, like they don't They don't have a technical director, they don't have an audio operator, and rarely do they even have camera operators in the studio anymore.
They're all just they're all just locked off shots or they have robotic heads that will turn and zoom and even.
Well you're not talking you're not talking about the talent. You're talking about the cameras with the robotic heads, right, it's.
Not robotic, not robotic talent, even though some may be seen robotic. Yes, but yeah, so a lot of robotic a lot of automation AI coming for that. But a lot of the AI focus was on eight camera tracking, so not only broadcast cameras but just PTC pantel zoom cameras for you know, you put a camera up at the back of the room and it can focus on a subject and follow them, keeping them in frame. You can then delegate one or two targets if you want it, so they can say, if this person is not there,
track this person. It's even getting to the point where they can say track player numbers and keep them in the middle of the frame. Oh, you can track. So you know, you could have a you could have a medium to a wide shot tracking specific players.
Yep, focus on the quarterback, focus on, yeah.
Yeah, focus you know, so based on facial recognition or player identification and things like that. So seeing a lot of that was pretty cool.
I will say this is kind of cool because when we first started doing the TV segments on KOLD and then KWBA, we did some stuff as well. It was cool because you always had somebody there on a pedestal camera that was you know, would zoom in, zoom in. They had second camera there, and you had camera operators. You had a floor director that would point to us and tell us, okay, you're on, you know, and then they would give us the symbol, the signal thirty seconds,
you know, wrap it up. I took a break for a short period of time before we switched from KLD to KMSB. When we came back, there were no more camera operators, And it was the strangest thing in the world to see these cameras that were mounted to the ceiling on posts that are all controlled via IP and the host can actually do something with that as well, the graphics, the teleprompter, all of that. But there's no floor director anymore, there's no camera operator. It's all been
brought into the booth. And then even the booth you look at they have this great look at booth, but there's maybe two or three operators that are in there and that's about it. So it's changed a lot, and I think we're gonna continues to see those changes. Some people have said we're going to see eventually AI newscasters, which I don't. I don't know, because I'd be honest with you. When I see something AI, I tend to look away. I tend to not be interested in it.
Well, right, So, I mean we've talked about that. I say this phrase a lot. We've talked about this on the show before. So maybe we're future predicting here the Uncanny Valley, right, people are going to know And it's it's all about consuming content, right, right, Like the more content you consume, the more you get used to it, but I don't think. I don't think people are gonna be people are gonna understand when it's AI. People are gonna hear AI. People are gonna see it, and it's
gonna be off putting. I don't think we're gonna get there, especially in the lark. Maybe in the smaller markets where there's not money to be made, but the larger markets like kswb's Fox five San Diego, New York, LA, like those places, they're so rooted in community. In those places, I doubt we'll see AI.
But in the smaller market stations that could be a possibility, especially if mom and pops. You wonder if mom and pop stations would be adaptive to it. I don't know, you know, I think it depends on the broadcaster. Like this is a small station that we're on here. The owners are very committed to being community oriented, very very about being local. They do a lot of talk segments that are featured on that and I don't think you
can get that with AI delivery. Radio is going to be facing changes, and I think the changes will come faster to radio than they will with TV because TV has two things to consider. It has audio and video, where radio is just basically basically just the audio portion of it. Now when it comes to ATSC three point Oh, that's been a big thing. Was that covered at this year's NAV?
Oh? Sure, yeah it was. I mean, but to what extent? I mean the future of television? Right, it's it is what it is, but it's who's adopting it. Everybody's moving to it, But what what stations? What station group in the US is doing four K? Nobody? Yeah, I mean they It was interesting because we talked a little bit about this because really the only reason to go four K is just to say you can, yeah, and NHK in Japan is eight K because they can and they're national.
AK over the air. Yeah.
HK in Japan is a K over the air and they're the only reason is because they can, yeah, and they can say we're the first country to do it. They're proud of that. But there's no who's watching it any k? I mean, I don't know it's Japan, who could be, could be everybody, But there's no reason to four K over the air. Yet We're never probably gonna go more higher than ten ADPHDR right for because there's no benefit beyond that for US but I mean some
replay stuff maybe four k down the road. But that's UHD. I mean you're you're running into a whole different level of how do you monitor that? How do you get it from point A to point B easily? It's there's a lot that goes into jumping from HD to ultra HD.
All right, So who had the biggest booth at this year's twenty twenty five National Association or Broadcasters Show?
Probably Sony.
Sony really for well everything right, cameras.
Software, everything cameras from their still camera line all the way through their broadcast line, their switchers, their production of their broadcast line. It was wild how much there's booth took up. Well, I walked through it with you. You'll see it.
Yep. Now what about Dji. Dji has been one of those companies that is is huge. DJ guys enormous. Were they there because of you know, some of the stuff they're going through now.
So they were definitely were there. They actually had a larger booth than I thought they were going to. They so they released their Ronan R five. I think it's the Ronan R five. Uh it's basically a really really high quality camera built onto a gimbal. It's literally a all in one camera gimble that you came out cinema lenses to. Oh wow, and it's battery power. It's great, it's incredible looking, and it's been used on a bunch
of feature films recently. So they were deubling that they had their awesome line there, they had their action cam line there, and they actually had their power banks there, which well, we'll talk a little bit more about that, but it was interesting how there's a lot of there were there were a lot of vendors that I saw that either had their own version of power banks or were powering their equipment with other power banks. Like here, look at our remote kit, Look at our remote setup.
Here we're powering our whole booth off of lithium ion batteries. So everybody has their own. The technology has gotten so much cheaper. Well maybe not now with whatever's coming with tariffs and stuff, but it's approachable. It's you can get this for relatively inexpensive that will power all of your lights, it'll power your laptop, it'll power your camera, it'll power remotely. You don't have to have a generator that makes noise. Right,
It's it's it's a it's a fanless unit. It makes enough power for what we need, for what they need. So d G I and I just heard people over overheard people saying I didn't know DJ I made these. I really know, well who knew. I mean, it's not something they it just kind of shadowed, dropped in the middle of the night one night. And you know, I bought one. I bought the thousand whatever, the DJ Power
one thousand. And it's been great. And at once we're not talking about ANAB and we come back from break, we'll talk a little bit more about specifically me using And.
This is a good and I'll tell you we talked about it before the show. It's a good reason for people to get one. I have a power I have a power bank. It's not that one. It's the one from I think it's Anchor, and I mean, I like it. It's okay, it's good. I kind of wish when I did the broadcast from a town of Sebdita, Sita, I wish it would have taken it with me because they brought me a gas powered generator and I thought, I wonder if the generator I had, the electric one would
have been better. But I have a solar power connector. I could have just put up the solar panels. I probably would have been okay, probably would instead of using the gas powered one.
So but I would. I would say that you're gonna see a lot more vendor specific battery packs, Tji, Small Rig, A handful of other companies I saw that were there a lot of them. Some of them were doing some big, big ones too big big, yeah, honkin, I mean on big wheels that are really heavy that you probably can't take on airplanes.
All right, So I'm wondering. I'm wondering. Now we TAWD you mentioned the word tariff. Of course, there's been a lot of concern how that's going to affect the technology industry. There was a word that we're not going to see the tarffs on that, and then the next day we were told no, no, no, somebody misspoke. We are going to see terraffs on some of the technology that's coming out of China and whatnot. But I'm wondering, did you see any US manufacturers of drone products there at an A B Because.
I mean, the only only drone stuff that I saw, I'm not I'm not saying this because I didn't look right, Yeah, DJ I didn't didn't even have I don't think I saw any of their drone stuff out on the floor. There was hardly any drone stuff at all, right, at any b I mean, I know that four or five years ago, it was the only thing people could talk about was drugs, drugs, drums. How easy it is. But people have moved on from the drones are cool. But yeah,
they're they're key peach piece. But I didn't see many other There was some literature about them, but I didn't see any big booze that had this is all we do is drones, right, you know, that kind of thing.
But the companies that we talked to, some of them did mention, well, we're going to have to you know, we're probably gonna have to boost our prices by twenty percent for tariffs, or yeah, you know, or hey, we spun up you know, our research and development center in the US is now are where we're putting our pieces together. So we it's now assembled in the US. You don't
have to pay tariffs. And so that was a common topic among our vendors because you know, we have a lot of Canadian vendors that work in the brocket industry. So it's interesting to see where that's going to go. And that could check up our price on equipment by twenty percent potentially for certain things.
Now you talked about that one gentleman you had met with the YouTube channel. Did you find there were a lot of influencers or internet companies that were there that want to create content for the web and they would be using this kind of stuff. I mean one of the in the video that you can actually see in this this video, Uh, there was even a car with all the camera mounts and like you would see them making a big screen movie. They could do this stuff.
Now you know creators can can do this kind of stuff.
Well, yeah, I mean it's not just television anymore. It's not just broadcast. It's television, it's radio, it's broadcast, it's Internet, it's cinema, it's everything that in terms of production, like the production value for the Internet is there. And you know, you had all the major parties involved in all Netflix, they were all there. They all had even Netflix really yeah, so they all had a presence. So well, I mean Netflix is a major broadcasting platform. Now live sports have
been on Netflix. The other big thing that was at ANB this year was cloud product, Like what everybody has a cloud solution, and it makes sense that these companies are building cloud platforms because if you have a cloud platform or a cloud product, this is my opinion on this, it's easier for you to get into their ecosystem. So let's say, like for for us at Notre Dame, we use Ross expression for our graphics. For our graphics packages
are Spore, bugst cetera. They offer a expression in the cloud package, meaning I can just pay Ross x amount of dollars for a license and then pay Amazon the price of the time that I'm using their instance online. Right, so they're whatever their s three bucket or whatever they're you know, e, two instant, whatever whatever the instance is called.
And you say Amazon for our listens, don't know AWS, that's AWS.
Whoever your cloud provider is. It could be a Zoo, a zoo, it could be a ask a good work. It's going to be easier for people to do smaller level productions at a scalable cost, meaning I could get expression level graphics on my show if I only need one graphic or two fonts or something, and I'm always spending you know, one thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars or whatever it's going to be, instead of getting a fifteen thousand dollars server and having a ten thousand dollars
license attached to it perpetually. Yeah, all right, So it's gonna you're gonna be able to timegate yourself a little bit. You're gonna be able to bring costs down based on the volume of your production, but spin up more if you need it. So everyone has a cloud production everybody has some sort of cloud production service, which it's going to in my opinion, it's gonna go towards a SaaS model software as a service model, meaning software will be
available to you in the cloud. You pay for it to be installed on your your Amazon Webon instance or a Zoo or whatever, and then you use it and then when it's off, you don't pay for it. You could spin it up, you pay for it, it's off, you don't pay for it. So you're gonna be able to get more money for your volume of content than if you just had hardware on prem One of.
The big companies that has really gone deep into SAS is Adobe, and you know, I've talked about my issues that I've had recently with Adobe, But were they there because they they are putting out some really great products when it comes to the post production process of whether it be photography or videography or or even film.
Yeah, I mean you had black Magic, Adobe, Avid, all the major all the major partners, all the major players in that space were there showcasing their stuff. It was cool to be able to walk around and you'd go over towards the Adobe booth and they'd have an editor from a major movie picture giving a talk showing their timeline on the screen and how they did it and how they used gender, you know, how they used AI or how they you know, basically showing how.
They did things that had to be great to see.
And then they had workshops. I could have sat and done workshops on generative AI with Firefly and other things like that. So they're all there, and they're all pushing towards AI. Yeah, and they're all going software as a service. I mean, that's just the way it is, and I don't foresee it ever going back to not that way because they it's so much easier for them to push forward in terms of advancement and technology then say we're going to gate this behind the news version, right and
forcing you to pay for a new version. You can just pay X about a month and get the most up to date and keep me keep moving forward and you can choose when you stop and you know that kind of stuff.
But all right, so I have to ask have you been to CES the Consumer Electronics Show? All right, so you've been down to Navy. So now what we have to do is we have to plan for you to be able to go to CES in January. Uh so that that way you can kind of compare them and see which one kind of holds more interest for you. So you could check that out because either way.
Yeah, I mean, I mean I've followed CEES and I know you guys have been to CS and the Consumer Electronic Show. It's intrigues me because I'm a techie. But I don't care about robots. I don't care about vacuum robots and you know ring doorbells that are gonna, yeah, shock the delivery guy when he doesn't deliver my package. I don't know. Like it's stuff like that that that's a good thought. Like I like conferences and you know, everybody told me, it's like, oh, make sure you wear
good shoes. And because you're gonna walk a lot. It's like, it's not like I haven't been to conventions, right, I just haven't been to broadcast. I've been to gaming conventions. I've been to other conventions. So it's like, I know I'm gonna walk a lot, but.
Right, all right, So we got to take a break. So here's what we're gonna do. For those watching the video, and you might want to jump in check out the video. We're gonna air the walkthrough that Sean did for the National Association Broadcasters Show. Watch that. We'll come back on the radio with more of tech talk Radio. Matter of fact, if you've been thinking about getting one of those electric power banks, why you want to do that? Sean is
a great example of that. When we come back, I'm aye Taylor.
I'm sure to wear it. Find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. We'll be rebetd And now back to tech talk Radio. Before the break, eighty was mentioned that I was gonna talk about my DJA power bank that I bought. We talked a little bit about because I saw it. They were at an A B and I'm boy, am I glad I bought it?
Now you got you got it. It was a like a push sail that just showed up in your inbox.
I got an email from djssay and get up to forty percent off or something.
Wow.
And then I saw that it was on sale on Amazon for like thirty percent off, and I was like, there's no way if I put this code in, it's gonna give you more than that. And sure off, I put the code in and it dropped it down to like three ninety nine or something. It was ridiculous. I got it for I got it for way cheaper than I should have. So it's it's the DJI power Bank
one thousands, enormous. It's pretty big, but it's got uh, it's got a C out, it's got DC out, and it's got the ability to plug into solar panels to charge it.
Is that a Buddy sticker you have on the top of that, Yeah?
An alien an alienware sticker, a Bucky sticker. We had a really bad storm come through central and northern Indiana beginning of the month, okay, and we're watching to roll through, no big deal, and then oh, delights just flickered. Oh oh, and then the power's out.
Oh man.
So most of our area, the Greater South Bend area didn't have power. Right, it was four o'clock. It was a Sunday. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Right, it wasn't too bad. So we were like, okay, whatever, we weathered it out. It was like, let's yeah, powers out. What are we gonna do? Yeah? Then Max is like I want to oh boy, oh, how are we going to do that?
Right now?
It's getting dark? How do we We're gonna turn some lights on? So I was like, oh hey, let me run into the basement. So I ran into the basement. I pulled this bad boy outright, and I plugged into lamp to it. And then I was like, well, why don't I My UPS is on? I have a UPS plugged into my internet, which so my internet never went out. So I was like, oh, I still WiFi. That's good. The cell phone service in our neighborhood stinks. So I was like, oh, I have Wi Fi, but how long the UPS will last?
Right?
So I plugged in one of my lamps to this, and I plugged in the powership that fed my internet, and we had internet in a light in our living room.
Oh cool, all right.
And it has a power draw meaning on it and those three things the motem, the router, my TV and the lamp. It said it was going to run like nineteen hours.
Are you kidding me? Nineteen hours? Oh that's great. I was sticking in the tops maybe two hours?
No, no, no it It gives you a power draw and I think it was pulling something like forty watts of power me right, So every and then I thought, well, I probably need to turn it plug my fridge.
Oh there you go, good, good eye.
So I ran an extension cord to this and powered my fridge.
Did it draw very much? Oh?
It threw a lot more. And then it said, oh, you like about ten hours?
Still, that's good.
Yeah. And then and then then at that point, I, you know, once we knew we weren't gonna be we were gonna be without power for more than twenty four hours. I have a thirty five hundred watt inverter generator that I ran outside, turned it on, ran the extension cord in the house, and you know, powered the fridge and the freezer and took the load off this from the fridge right, but this was great.
Could you charge now? Could you charge that at this same time off the thirty five hundred generator outside?
You sure can. There's this fancy little switch on the front that says twelve hundred watts or six hundred watts. Well, when I plugged it in, it was in the twelve hundred wat mode, and boy did my generator let me know it was pulling twelve hundred watts.
Oh oh, I plugged it.
I plugged it into charge, and my generator took it. Was like, whoa, hey, I gotta put more power out because then I then I looked, and then my generator definitely the generator kicked into high mode because it was pulling. It was pulling twelve hundred watts right just to charge this let alone also run my fridge and the freezer. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna back that down a little bit. So I put it in the six hundred watt mode and it settled down a little bit.
Nice.
When when we got power back, we were without power for almost we were over forty eight hours, so we had power for two So when this was plugged into the generator, charge and then obviously when I when it was full, I just ran the the other the pieces that I needed off just this. You know cell phones,
it's got USBC on the front. So we plugged our cell phones into it, plumped our smart watches into it overnight and but from like like a ten percent charge on this when it was finally like our I needed to charge it. Once our power came back on, right, this thing went from zero like like a ten or twelve percent charge to full in like thirty five minutes.
Wow, that's amazing.
It was. It was crazy because it just it just yanks so much power out of the out of the ether, and it was really great. So very happy with the DJI power one thousand.
How much now that was? You got it for three ninety nine? What do they normally go for.
At only seven hundred bucks? I have to look to see if going for Amazon. Right now, let's look Amazon, Let's see what she's got.
I know that in you know, southern Arizona, we deal with monsoons quite a bit and we've had those situations where you we've lost power for an extended period of time. This would be pretty good to have around. I mean, ups these are great, but again those are you know, most UPS's are designed so that'll give you time to shut down your computer systems so you don't have any data corruption or whatnot. This is a way to go beyond that and actually power your stuff.
Yeah, and you could obviously have it plugged into power and be feeding it off the AC side. So if you wanted to treat this as a UPS you really could and dry your power from the AC side while still plugged in charging. I wouldn't recommend that. It's just gonna yeah, yeah, decrease the LFE of the battery, but they are six ninety nine.
That's still not bad. I mean it's something to have, and they the battery in that will continue to last. You just recharge it. It's not like disposable. Once it's done, it's done. No, that doesn't work that way.
Yeah. But what I also like too is on the side I didn't notice before it, but there are quarter twenty right mounting holes here, so like I could mount tripod arms or other pieces on here. I could mount things on here with the quarter twenty mounts like a ramball mount too. I could put an accessory on or you know, so there are mounting options available quarter twenty
on the side so you can put. Wow, I don't even know what you want to mount on there, but like I can imagine like maybe mounting an umbrella or all holder for your phone or some other piece of hardware you'd want to mount it.
When it comes to the power banks, if you don't charge it, obviously you're not going to get a full charge out of it. When you do a full charge on it and you just put it aside and you're not using it, does it retain that or over time does it tend to just dwindle up? So we've seen some devices actually go pretty quick.
Well, So this is the newer chemistry, right, the life lithium iron phosphate, lithium iron light life PO four Okay, lithium iron phoss whatever it's called life life PO for you'll see, that's the newest kind of chemistry for these types of batteries. And that's what's in here, right, So I know, so that the chemistry is made to retain its charge better, it can have a higher amp draw on it, and it can also use more of the total capacity of the battery without having to be recharged.
So I just also for my camper, UH just bought a new one hundred amp hower battery for my twelve volt battery for the camper with the new solar charger, plus another one hundred solar panel for that also so that I can have that or camping in addition to this. So off the grid, we'll go there, you go, not really, but we're gonna be able to survive a little bit without running the gas.
Janitor, this was your first chance to really put it through the big trial, and you're you're very happy with that, then, yeah.
I mean it was. I just went and got it, turned it on, plugged in a lamp, and then ran an extension cord over to the UPS that was powering my my internet router and my motem and my TV and we had zero issues with staying connected. Uh and Max getting his YouTube fix. That's great during the power So.
That's great because you know the kids, they need to be entertained.
But it's funny because Max we had to explain to like the powers out, like YouTube doesn't work, and the lights in his room didn't work, so like his his moon nightlight wasn't working, the hatch wasn't working, so like he didn't have so it was a lot more quiet in his room, like he didn't have the sound you know, the white noise machine. Right, so that like the next you know, the next night where we had power, when
he turned the light on his room, he got excited. Oh, the power's back, Like he understood that we didn't have power. Now it's back and the light works on power. So it was kind of a cool experience for him to see, like power is required for a lot of the stuff that makes life convenient for us.
Yeah, absolutely, all right. I wanted to mention zd net and Ed Bott has been on this show before. We had to Ed on gosh early early on tech Talk Radio, and Ed talked about the deals he's been talking about the deals with Windows eleven and Windows ten. There is a great article from Ed if you go to zd net about how to if you can still do it, go from Windows ten to Windows eleven. Now October is when support for Windows ten will end. It does not
mean your Windows ten computer will stop working. There'll be a paid support version if you feel like doing that. But again some people have said, I, well, I was just wat upgrade my computer. You know, if I could have upgraded my computer in the studio from ten to eleven easily, I wouldn't have lost some software that I
needed to do that. So right now, that Windows eleven machine I built, it's just sitting in the corner because I can't put the software on that to get it to work for what I need to do in here. But zd net also had a story this week about some of the problems that Microsoft is running into and it just makes you wonder what's going on there with a patch that they had put out and it caused some problems.
They the Microsoft has been shooting himself in the foot.
Yeah.
First it was the recall stuff with you know, hey, we're going to snapshot your computer every two minutes and upload it to the cloud. No you're not, You're not not in my computer. And then they had issues with USB devices in a recent patch, and now they're all claiming it's for security. But there's a new patch that came out for Windows eleven twenty four h two that created what what they're calling a mysterious empty folder.
The folder is called pub say I've seen.
It, yeah, And apparently that folder is there to spoof malware into trying to take control of this folder. I don't know, but if you but if you delete that folder because you don't know what it is and don't know where it came from, good luck with your future Windows updates, because it will could cause problems because it's looking for that folder. It doesn't know where that folder is, and you who knows what problems you're gonna start having.
It's like somebody telling you to go and delete your system thirty two folder.
Oh man, not good. Yeah, no, don't do that, by the way, Yeah, please don't.
But yeah, it's just Windows. I mean, it's it's it's it's gotta be hard to release software that is so ma consumed around the world, right, in so many different languages and so many different platforms, in so many different scenarios.
So many different pieces.
Yeah, so many mission critical places. Right, You're never going to catch every little bug. But I mean, come on, it's it's it's just it's unacceptable. Things like the USB driver issues, where if you upgraded and all of a sudden you just don't have USB, your USB devices aren't going to work anymore.
I think that's our shared folders that we have from one office to to another. They went away once we went to Windows eleven.
So yeah, I mean, I just don't know and like and then Microsoft telling you, oh, yeah, by the way, you are not going to be able to create a window. You're not gonna be able to install Windows anymore without creating an account, and you can't use the super secret code to bypass the log in anymore. You have to Yeah, you have to create account with Microsoft to install Windows,
which is a bunch of bs in my opinion. And because I just talked about this building, you know, building the PC for my in laws their laptop, and the code didn't work, so maybe I got an early version of that that were that code didn't work anymore, and I had to build them a profile using his his hotmail or his Gmail account through Microsoft, and then it created them having the one drive desktop and then he put all his files on there. It was out of space.
It was as Yeah, it was a mess.
So like, just give me an operating system, let me decide, let me decide what I want to do. Yeah, I paid I paid for it. I paid for Windows. Like, I'm not saying this because I got a free upgrade to Windows eleven. I paid for I've paid for two Windows eleven pro versions. Now yep, because I want one. I have one on my play around machine, and I have one on my gaming lots on my gaming PC, like I want to have the features that are included
with one is eleven Pro. But dear God, make it a little easier for me to do what I want to do without having to sign up and give you all my data. I don't care like I'm paying you.
Yeah, exactly. All right, listen, we got to take another break. We come back with more of tech talk Radio. We got more stuff. We have listener email, and we'd love to be able to answer your questions for you, so we'll get to those questions coming up with more of tech talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm sean to Weird.
Find us on Facebook at tech Talkers.
We'll be right back.
Now back to tech talk Radio.
Everybody out there in radio, and this is James Young from the rock band Stick. If you are technically challenged, if you've.
Got trouble with that computer yours, because Lord knows I do, you need to listen to tech Talk Radio. Thanks to your help and treep up the good work.
You got a great show. Okay, so listener email, we love this one. You want to send us a question? You could drop us an email anytime, Just tech Guys to e hg uys at tech talkRADIO dot com, or you can reach out to us on our Facebook page as well. You'll find us on Facebook, Facebook, dot com, forward slash tech Talkers. So this one from Christy in Tucson said, Hey guys, I listened to your show whenever I can, but I just got an email about renewing
my anti virus program Norton three sixty. It's one hundred and nineteen bucks to renew and protect my five machines. Uh, thinking is it worth it? What could be my options? Thank you Christy and Tucson. Oh boy, this one. I think we've kind of talked a little bit about this in the past because I know you have different views of what might be better than Norton.
Yeah, So I mean I've used I've used different anaviruses over the years, right, Yeah, and it's not always been just antivirus, right, it's also an anti malware.
Right.
First, with antivirus, because nobody really knew what malaur was. Yeah, you had trojan horses, you had virus attacks, so those things. So everybody either had Norton. McAfee caster Scott set E set, they're all they all do their job. But in the age of security, Windows has gotten a lot better. And I would recommend, and I think Justin and Matt let's speak for this, and they're both IT professionals. You can really be secure without spending money just running Windows Defender.
I mean, obviously, don't go in and turn your firewall off and allow every port to be able to be scanned on your computer and blah blah blah blah. By default, a lot of that is turned off. By default. They're protecting the users that don't know any better. But that doesn't mean run unprotected and you know, grow surfing around the web unprotected. Yeah, my recommendation is if you want a little extra protection is you get malware bites. Malware bytes is a malware program that will run and scan
and do things, and it's there there. It's run at the enterprise level in a lot of places, so not just personal. And so I run personally, I run malware bites and it protects my PC.
We've even had it come up. You go to a website that's a legitimate website, they're feeding an AD and the AD has malware features in that ad. Malware bites will flag it. It does a good job. So yeah, I'm looking at.
To see what malur bytes would be to include multiple devices.
Right, Yeah, that's the thing. Norton's deal and I'm on Norton. Norton's steal is five machines. I know that for a fact, and yet it is about one hundred nineteen bucks to renew it. One thing about Norton three sixty if you know, it's it's been a good antivirus program, but it's very naggy. So you pop in a you know, an expanded drive, it wants to search it for you. You get pop ups all the time about would you like to do this?
Would you like to do that? It will try to sell you add ons like LifeLock, which Symantec Norton owns, so it'll try and you know, sell you for a membership in that to protect yourself for that information and get out there on the web. Again, I'm not saying it's a bad program. We've had representatives on the show. I like it, but there are other options. Now, what were you able to find out?
So I have the standard plan for melerbyites, right, and it's just one device, So I'm only running it on just my PC. I thought I was running it on more but just one, and I think I pay like six bucks a month.
That's not bad, Yeah, if I wanted to do so.
I just bumped it up to the next the plus plan with five devices, so that would equal what she has for her Norton and it's sixteen sixteen twenty eight a month for five devices. That gives you the security, the browser guard which runs in the background basically looks at ads and all that stuff.
So it's actually more expensive than Norton three sixty for the five.
Yeah, but that also gives you the VPN. I don't know if the Norton three sixty gives you in Norton VPN. So I mean you're it's apples and apples at this point. I just know that Norton does not always have the best reputation in the industry. It's good, But you said, I prefer melourbites just just because that's what I'm used to. It's what we use at the university, it's what I've used at other places i've worked. There are plenty of options out there, right, just try to avoid the free ones.
Yeah, yeah, try to avoid what was the other there was another one that began with an A I can't remember the name of it.
I can't remember either, but yeah, just try to avoid the free ones because they'll try and get the try and hook you into well just scan your PC and paid five a month or And I still personally like running sea cleaner.
Yeah, I've heard different about that where people some people say CE sea cleaner is great. I'll just will say it created a nightmare.
I have not had any issues with it. I use it just to do just registery clean up and some they have a really great uninstallation tool in their program where you can just uninstall programs really quickly through that. I mean you can do that now with Windows. It's gotten better in Windows before where you had to just to try and fight all the install files.
And some of these companies though, will put a lot of files in different places, and from what I've heard, CC cleaner can go in there and do that.
But I will say that CC cleaner has not had the greatest security record about I want this has probably been about six or seven years now. They actually delivered an update to CCA Cleaner that was malware. A Iranian hacker team was able to get into the back end and attached malware to the install file for Seat Cleaner. So everybody that did the update that version of Sea Cleaner got malware.
Not good.
So all right, not good for security company.
But so for Christy, you recommend malwour bites as one to look at.
Yeah, malwaar bites. And then if you really want to do a deep skin or a deep dive on your machine, spybot search and destroy is a good one. Just avoid the free ones. I mean, you could pay for Norton. It's gonna be you know, like I said, six one way half it does the other. If you're still using Norton, you're comfortable with dead it's already on your devices. Go with Norton. It's not gonna hurt anything, all right. Malwaur bites is just kind of another alternative.
Do you want to pick that? Next question that we got? The next question is, okay, this is a fun one, all right.
I found a folder on my computer that had everything that had a bunch.
Of flash videos flash videos.
When I click on them, I can't do anything because I no longer have flash on my computer. Okay, there are a way to see.
These, that's flv's right, isn't that good question?
Bill Chandler from Arizona.
No, it's actually Bill from Chandler, Arizona.
Bill from Chandler, Arizona.
Thank you Bill, Sorry, grammar is important.
You put this in there. Andy, it looks like Chandler from Arizona.
Yes. Uh so flash videos flv's uh yeah, flash was big. It was one time everything. You went to a website, if it didn't have flash, it was a letdown. If it had flash, it was oh. But then they found out there were a lot of problems with flash, and people moved to word press or that type of technology. You know flash. You go to a website now if you still see you might see a placeholder it said you know flash, and you're, oh boy, that needs an update.
What do you do? How do you watch a flash video on your computer?
You have to you'd have to convert them.
Yeah, I mean so.
I'll recommend my handy dandy web tool right handbreak, handbreak, Oh well, handbreak are handbreak can convert flash videos?
All right?
You could probably find a lot of free converters online for flash videos.
How about VLC. It might just play them, it may not convert them.
Yeah, it may it may not play them, it'll it'll Yeah. Vlc is is probably the best media player in the world. All Right, it's free, download it. It'll play literally anything you give it.
Just be careful where you get it from, but make.
Sure you get it from there from their website.
All Right, we got to take another quick break to see it one of those. All right, Bill Chandler or Bill from Chandler Arizona. Hopefully that helped you. But take a look at LC if you want to convert them. I know Movavi does that. Handbreak is great because that's a free one, and then you may be able to go a little deeper into handbreak and find out how to maybe rip your DVDs that you own that you can have digital copies of them. It's a great, great
way to use that program. All Right, we'll be back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor.
I'm sean to Whirred. Follow us on x at tech Talk Radio.
We'll be right back on television. This past week I got a chance to share something really cool, the slim, small design keyboard from Logitech called the Keys to Go to. It connects to your smartphone, whether it be an Android or an iPhone, your laptop, your desktop, your any device that can accept the Bluetooth connection. Keyboard, and it could be folded and stored away. Matter of fact, it's small enough that you could fold it and put it in
your jacket pocket, your inside jacket pocket. So when you need a keyboard, you've got it. The only thing is some people have said, well, wait a minute. It retails for about seventy nine bucks, but the K four to eighty from Logitech is cheaper. You may be able to find that for around forty five fifty dollars, and they both have Bluetooth. They both have a selector switch, so you can switch it from Bluetooth one, two or three.
So say you've got your smartphone in front of you, you got a tablet, you want to control the tablet, you just flip the switch and you can control the tablet. Flip it to the other one. You can control your smartphone. Now your smartphone will work good on that well, if you use a Google Docs or something along that line, you want to type, or you're using you know, your notes in your your iPhone. Either way, you might take a look at it. If you haven't seen it yet.
Again that's from Logitech. The keys to go to pretty good stuff. I don't I don't know. I like the K four eighty because it's got a little rest there. But that's what I showed on TV. I also showed it connected to a monitor and we used a J five create it's an HGMI USBC off my Android device to actually put put our smartphone away and use a bigger monitor use that keyboard. And it was actually pretty pretty cool thing.
So I mean this, I just I didn't know about this, so I just looked it up. This it's pretty cool.
It's tiny, It's really small, and it's got to cover on it, so you could close it up and again put it in your laptop bag or put it into your your your your jacket pocket if you're wearing a jacket pocket or your and there's.
There's some different colors you can get. It's cool.
Yes, I mean this would.
Be great, like if you're traveling and you have a laptop and you don't want to use the laptop keyboard, Graphite, pale gray, and lilac.
There you go. You can find out more lunch tech dot com. That wraps it up for this week's Tech Talk Radio Thank you for tuning in. Tell your friends about it that they can see us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean to Weird.
You can find us on the web, like Andy said, at TikTok radio dot com. Thank you. We'll talk to you next week, all right.
Take care,